Contact centers may be used by an organization to communicate in an efficient and systematic manner with outside parties. Such centers may for example have large numbers of agents staffing telephones, and interacting with outside parties and with each other. Calls may be placed on hold or into an interactive voice response (IVR) system when first connected to the contact center; subsequently an agent may take a call, place it back on hold, transfer the call, conference in another agent, or take other such actions related to the call. Outside parties may also interact with a contact center by other mechanisms, including initiating contact through on-line chat, video, email, and the like.
The session initiation protocol (SIP) standard may be used in a contact center to conduct communications over an Internet Protocol (IP) network, which may operate within the contact center, and which may connect to outside networks such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through one or more gateways. An IP network may also extend outside of the contact center, enabling, for example, communications with parties connected to the Internet without the need to use the PSTN.
It may in some situations be advantageous to construct large contact centers, in which, for example, thousands of agents are employed. A large contact center may be helpful, for example, to an enterprise with a central contact telephone number from which each incoming call is dispatched to an agent according to the reason for the call, to an enterprise where it is often necessary to forward a call from one agent to another, or to an enterprise in which many agents work from different geographical locations. In such cases, it may be inefficient to construct multiple small independent call centers.
It may be advantageous for the software and hardware employed in a large contact center to be modular, scalable, readily expanded or reduced in size, and suitable for providing high availability service. Scalability may be important because performance-limiting bottlenecks may pose increasingly difficult challenges as contact center deployments become very large.